Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizi...ng, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I borrowed today out of the Advocate's Library, David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, but found it so abstruse, so contrary to so...und sense and reason, and so drearying its effects on the mind, if it had any, that I resolved to return it without reading it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis..., and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Let us become thoroughly sensible of the weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason: Let us duly consider its uncertai...nty and endless contrarieties, even in subjects of common life and practice.... When these topics are displayed in their full light, as they are by some philosophers and almost all divines; who can retain such confidence in this frail faculty of reason as to pay any regard to its determinations in points so sublime, so abstruse, so remote from common life and experience?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It must appear impossible, that theism could, from reasoning, have been the primary religion of human race, and have afterwards, b...y its corruption, given birth to polytheism and to all the various superstitions of the heathen world. Reason, when obvious, prevents these corruptions: When abstruse, it keeps the principles entirely from the knowledge of the vulgar, who are alone liable to corrupt any principle or opinion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

We should omit a main attraction in these books, if we said nothing of their humor. Of this indispensable pledge of sanity, withou...t some leaven of which the abstruse thinker may justly be suspected of mysticism, fanaticism, or insanity, there is a superabundance in Carlyle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »